Truth at 0.25 frames per second.

Here’s the recipe. You film a bunch of footage of your band playing a song. Then you edit that footage into a music video – actually, several overlapping music videos. Convert the videos to a series of still images (3500 in all), print them, and collect them in a dozen binders.

Cajole a bunch of your friends into driving to a bar in a nearby small town for a “birthday party”. Prop the binders up in front of a camera and, with some help from your friends, flip through the pages at the steady rate of four seconds per page. This will take approximately two hours and forty minutes, assuming everything goes perfectly; if it doesn’t, more like four hours. (After a couple hours, most of your friends will leave.)

Speed up the video and synch it to the song. Voila! You’ve got…well, uh, something like…

M.

Update, Mar 24 2010: A guy from the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo interviewed me about this video for the paper’s website. I’m pretty sure I explained our process far less clearly in the interview than I did in the above blog post, but anyway you can watch it here.